The claimed embodiment relates to a wireless communication system, and more particularly to detecting and decoding a signal in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) communication system.
A MIMO communication system transmits and receives data using multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas. A MIMO channel, formed by transmit and receive antennas, is divided into a plurality of independent spatial subchannels. Because the MIMO system employs multiple antennas, it outperforms a single antenna system by having greater channel capacity.
Multiple antenna techniques also allow spatial multiplexing of data streams originating from one or multiple users. MIMO detection schemes used in the latest recommendations from standards organization use equalizers having weight matrices for every subcarrier and multiplication of the OFDM subcarrier received signals from different antennas to get estimates of the transmitted data symbols. The performance and complexity of such systems will depend on the number of antennas used. As more antennas are used, the greater the complexity of the system. Greater complexity may typically require additional computational blocks.